He has been a Professor of Political Science at York University
since 1984. He was the Chair of the Department of Political Science
at York from 1988-1994. He was the General Co-editor of State and
Economic Life series, U. of T. Press, from 1979 to 1995 and is the
Co-founder and a Board Member of Studies in Political Economy. He
is also the author of numerous articles and books dealing with
political science including The End of Parliamentary Socialism
(1997). He was a member of the Movement for an Independent and
Socialist Canada, 1973-1975, the Ottawa Committee for Labour
Action, 1975-1984, the Canadian Political Science Association, the
Committee of Socialist Studies, the Marxist Institute and the Royal
Society of Canada. He is currently a supporter of the Socialist
Project.

He is a prominent exponent of Marxism who sees his own work as theoretically
innovative within that tradition, because he maintains that the dominance of the United States in the early
years of the twenty-first century can't be understood using
theories of imperialism that are themselves a century
old.

He has argued, for example, that the concept of imperialism
developed for the Victorian era over-emphasized the matter of the
export of capital. Yet if one uses that as a yardstick today (he
reasons) Great Britain is more a victim of U.S. imperialism than
Kenya -- since American investors have much more at stake in the
former than in the latter. The advanced industrial nations, in
other words, are interpenetrating -- exporting capital to one
another, not to the 'South,' and this requires a great deal of
revision in Marxist-Leninist models.

Panitch has also argued that Marx was wrong to contend that the
rise of trade unions would develop a socialistic class-consciousness in the working class.
The association of workers for the purpose of collective bargaining
has proven quite compatible with capitalism -- since such bargaining concerns
the terms of wage labor, not the legitimacy of wage
labor. He argues that Marxist political parties must abandon the
assumption that there is anything inherently revolutionary about
any class, so that they can get to work creating a self-conscious
revolutionary class of wage earners, "articulating the
articulation."